Between the negro and his master there was ever in general a feeling of mutual respect and confidence. If I could gather from the Old South its most beautiful and quaint conceits and incidents, I would find none so full of pathos and interest as the long-continued and ever-deepening affection that often, indeed I might say commonly, bound together the white master and the black slave. Neither poverty nor ruin, nor changed conditions, nor disruption of every order, social and political, was effectual in breaking this bond of loyalty and love; and now, so long after the period of enfranchisement has come, if I wanted concrete evidence of the singular beauty of the social system of the Old South, I should summon as my witnesses those lingering relics of the ante-bellum order—the “old massa” and the old negro. Before the last of that era are gone I should be glad to contribute to some such monument as that proposed by ex-Governor Taylor—a trinity of figures to be carved from a single block of Southern marble, consisting of the courtly old planter, high-bred and gentle in face and manner; the plantation “uncle,” the counterpart in ebony of the master so loyally served and imitated; and the broad-bosomed black “mammy,” with varicolored turban, spotless apron, and beaming face, the friend and helper of every living thing in cabin or mansion. I would that I had the power to put before you vividly and really the strange and beautiful social life of the Old South. It was Arcadian in its simplicity and well-nigh ideal in its conditions. It was a reproduction of the palmiest days and best features of feudalism, with little of the evil of that system. I know I am confronted by a host of critics and maligners of the so-called “slaveocracy” or “oligarchy” of the Old South. I have often read and heard of its despotism and cruelty from those who did not know or did not intend to be truthful or just. The war that swept slavery and the slaveholder out of existence was inspired and envenomed by such misrepresentation. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a museum of barbarities set forth as the ordinary life of the Old South, a composite of brilliant and brutal falsehoods. I have no defense of feudalistic subjection of the many to the few, nor am I a friend to caste. Yet I have read history in vain and studied human progress to small account if I have not, with others, discovered that a true development of society, the stability of government, the conservation of the rights of all classes, depend largely upon a social system in which one class, few in numbers, capable and conscientious, rules the other classes. A pure democracy is the dream of the idealist, and would be unprofitable even in the millennium. The men who own the lands of a country, its moneys, ships, and commerce, who maintain the traditions of the past, and trace their blood to the beginnings of a country’s existence—these will inevitably become the leaders and rulers of a country.